How an American Neo-Nazi Was Made

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As a young young man, he tried on a number of identities: anti-racist hippie in suburban Ohio, anti-capitalist hunter-gatherer in the Philippines.

But the identity that made Andrew Anglin notorious on the internet?

Neo-Nazi.

Is a new generation of dangerous trolls on the rise?

Or are they just now on our radar?

This is Radio Atlantic.

Hi, I'm Matt Thompson, Executive Editor of The Atlantic.

Over there in New York, we have my esteemed co-host, Jeffrey Goldberg.

Hi, Jeff.

Hi, Matt.

This week, we're sitting down with two journalists who've covered what seems to be a rising tide of extremist voices in the U.S.

Here in D.C., we've got Rosie Gray, staff writer and White House reporter for The Atlantic, who's done a significant amount of reporting on the so-called alt-right.

Hello, Rosie.

Hello.

And here with us also this week, we have the reporter Luke O'Brien, who wrote the cover story in the December 2017 issue of The Atlantic titled The Making of an American Nazi.

Hello, Luke.

Hi.

Thank you for joining us, both of you.

Luke, your story walks us through the life of a man named Andrew Anglin, who went from being a teenage vegan, anti-racist, hippie in Columbus, Ohio, to founding the world's biggest neo-Nazi website, The Daily Stormer.

Now, start us off, Luke, by telling us how you first came to hear about Andrew Englin.

I actually first learned about Andrew England in the summer of 2015.

I think it was about two weeks after Donald Trump declared his candidacy for president.

And Andrew Englin jumped right on board and endorsed him.

And

many other neo-Nazis followed suit.

That's how I found out about him.

Why did he interest you

well?

I was intrigued by him from that point, actually, because I noticed how many white nationalists were throwing their support behind Donald Trump.

It was not getting the appropriate amount of coverage in the mainstream media at the time, and I suspected that something strange was going on out there in the political hinterlands, and I started tracking it from then on.

Yeah.

Tell us what was the turning point.

What happened in the life of this guy, as best as you could detect, that transformed him into a Nazi?

If I had to point to one thing, it would be rejection.

Rejection romantically, rejection from the job market, and a feeling of

societal rejection as well, which then curdles into a form of anger that we're all trying to understand.

But, you know, I mean, I can't speak for Matt, but I've experienced rejection in my life and I didn't become a Nazi.

I mean, so what's the what's the missing Matt, you've never been rejected by anything.

That's, is that fair?

That is not fair.

That is not fair.

I also

miss rejection.

What is the, what is the, what's the missing piece, though?

Because a lot of people go through setbacks and they don't become lunatics.

What do you think is the missing piece?

Well, I do think it is also a lack of critical thinking skills, as I mentioned in the piece.

A lot of these guys need an outlet for this feeling of rejection, and they turn to what I've been calling trutherville.

They all have different routes to neo-Nazism, but I've found that this is a very common one among members of the alt-right, this younger generation of white nationalists, because they can find these echo chambers online where they sink into their confirmation bias and it just there's almost a prefabricated ideology that they can latch onto and be able to focus their feelings of anger.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: One thing that I would add in terms of why a lot of these young men turn to this kind of ideology is that it's not only a sense of alienation or rejection, but also that this gives them a way to stand out.

and be sort of special and get attention.

If you don't have a lot going on in your life and you feel like you're just sort of normal and boring and sort of disaffected, you know, becoming an alt-right troll is a way to sort of feel like you're doing something punk and edgy and special.

Yeah.

Normal and boring and sort of disaffected is a pretty good description of the character of Andrew England as he comes across in your story, Luke.

But why was it that so many people followed him?

How did he come to command a troll army?

I think that actually gets at the point Rosie was making there.

It's these guys are seeking to find some form of significance in society.

It's powerless people

searching out power in whatever fashion they can find it.

And

I also think there's a real tribal aspect to this.

These are young guys who are finding themselves online and finding each other online.

And they may not live in proximity to each other, but the Internet has enabled them to connect and create this sense of community.

They're searching for that too.

And there's a power that comes from being part of a tribal group, being part of a gang, really.

Aaron Ross Powell, Rosie, how closely did Andrew England's origin story track with some of the other figures that you've observed in this orbit?

You know, I think that elements of it are

pretty common, you know, sort of relatively normal upbringing, nothing

particularly remarkable really about his childhood.

I think what's one thing that was really fascinating in Luke's story that I didn't know about Andrew England was the fact that as a teenager, he was this sort of, you know, vegan leftist, you know, anti-fascist type.

That was really useful information to know because it sort of shed light on his ability and sort of propensity for latching himself onto causes.

But, you know, obviously the story gets much weirder after that when there's this interlude in the Philippines and there's some suggestion that he spent a lot of time in Russia.

And so that stuff, I mean, that seems sort of singular to him.

England does a fair amount of soul searching.

Yes, if you want to call it that.

Yeah, so he graduated from high school, and he wound up eventually in the Philippines, where he spent quite a bit of time, several years, particularly in southern Philippines, in Mindanao.

England was drawn to kind of the lawlessness of the region and just, you know, living outside his comfort zone.

Yeah, he was going to become like a hunter-gatherer for a minute.

Well, yeah, the reason why he actually went to the Philippines is because he had this awakening when he was in Columbus that the world was a mess in America.

He was very anti-capitalist.

He did not like the American system.

And he decided that the only way forward for him, and really for humanity, if they would just listen to him, is to return to hunter-gatherer lifestyle.

So he went off in search of a tribe that he could become part of, an actual tribe.

And he he ended up finding one in the Philippines, in Mindanao, the Tiboli.

Initially, that's the tribe that he spent some time with.

He had essentially a white savior complex.

He was going to go and live with this group of people that had been in this area for thousands of years and teach them how to grow crops.

And

things do not work out well for him, as you might imagine.

Wow.

At the time, he was also very into some of these delusional conspiracy theories.

The moon landing was a hoax, among others.

And he was already a big fan of Alex Jones at that point.

And I think that that is

a key inflection point in his journey.

Alex Jones, probably America's premier conspiracy theorist, the guy who's on InfoWars, and also a big fan of Donald Trump.

Trump also is a fan of Jones.

And he has been, I think, a waypoint to white nationalism, or to at least that process of radicalization.

And the gateway is into that conspiracy theory land.

And that's where Andrew Anglin went after high school and spent years there, years hanging out on very strange sites in weird forms with a lot of crazy types, all talking amongst themselves.

And eventually he built his own site dedicated to this.

It was essentially a conspiracy theory aggregation site where he was still trying at that point, I think, to pursue, I guess, what you could call a traditional writing career.

He fancied himself a writer going all the way back to high school.

Hunter Thompson was his idol.

And I think he was still on a track where

he could have become part of sort of the normal mainstream, but he spent too long.

you know, in these echo chambers and

he went on from there.

Yeah.

Luke, could you,

I mean, as much as I'd like to blame the Internet for everything wrong in the world, fascism predates the Internet.

How much do you ascribe Andrew England's success, quote-unquote, to the Internet?

And how much of his radicalization process do you ascribe to the Internet?

I would say quite a bit.

You're absolutely right.

Fascism does predate the Internet.

It predates, one could even argue, Nazi Germany.

It goes back to Mussolini.

But there are sort of fascist tendencies in American culture that predate even World War II.

And, you know, nativism and nationalism, people don't want to acknowledge it.

That's why you hear so many,

especially conservative voices, who want to describe these guys as fringe.

Look away.

If you ignore them, they'll go away.

And that may have been true to some extent.

20, 30, 40 years ago, when you had some Klansmen gathering to burn a cross cross in a small town and they're there for an hour and then they go on their way.

But what makes it different now is that these platforms that these guys have available to them, and

I don't want to go too far in this comparison, but it is similar to an ISIS-style model online, where if you have some inclination toward fascism or racism, misogyny, hate, whatever it might be,

it's very easy to find

your place online now and like-minded people and and feel like you're part of a growing movement.

Aaron Ross Powell Another thing that's specific to the alt-right really is that and kind of the reason that they've been able to become relatively popular is because the sort of language and culture of the alt-right is so based off of internet meme culture and 4chan culture and really in this sort of knowing kind of, is it ironic or is it not

vibe that

they put out.

And I think that that's kind of why they've been able to edge a little bit closer to the mainstream, and that's because of the internet.

Luke, you start your story with a woman named Tanya Gersh, and her story is, in some ways, an illustration of what happens when these threats that can seem abstract or just on the internet come real.

Tell us what Tanya Gersh went through.

Well, she may have been subjected to the worst troll storm that England has whipped up.

And by that, I mean he had at his command dozens, if not hundreds, of followers online, people who would visit his site, who'd hang out in his comment section, and

he sixed them on people for whatever reason.

It could just be as simple as what happened to Tanya Gersh.

She's Jewish, and she got into a dispute with the mother of another white nationalist, Richard Spencer.

And

yeah, so England put his trolls on her.

And you're talking about waking up in the middle of the night and having a Nazi on the other line

cursing at you, threatening you.

And imagine this a hundred-fold, two hundred-fold

emails, texts.

You know, Tanya Gersh is in trauma therapy because of this.

There are very real-world effects that happen when people are harassed like this.

What is the threat of violence from this,

from Andrew England types?

Trevor Burrus: I think it's the lone wolf threat.

England is very careful not to cross what we call the Brandenburg threshold, which

refers to a Supreme Court decision about how far you can go with your speech in terms of making threats or inciting violent activity.

And he knows exactly where that limit is, and he coaches his trolls on that as well.

So they're very careful in what they say online.

But that doesn't change the fact that several of his readers have actually murdered people.

Now, that's not something Anglin orchestrates, but he's attracting a violent crowd to his site, and he is advocating for violence in general.

Remind us very quickly of those cases.

Yeah, I mean, Dylan Roof walked into a church in Charleston and massacred several people.

He was a reader of the Daily Stormer and a commenter on the Daily Stormer.

Parts of his manifesto have been found in the comments section of the Daily Stormer verbatim under one poster's name.

A week before Brexit, Labor MP Joe Cox was murdered in the UK by a suspected Daily Stormer reader.

There's James Jackson, and that is also one that got a lot of attention.

That happened not too long ago, where a white man went to New York with a sword and stabbed a black homeless man to death.

and then was interviewed in jail and said that he named one ideological influence on him, and it was the Daily Stormer.

Luke, where is Andrew England now?

Well, nobody actually knows, and

it's quite a

hunt going on for him because he's been sued by Tanya Gersh and the SPLC.

He's also been sued by a Muslim-American comedian.

England forged tweets linking this guy to ISIS or terrorism or something.

So that guy has now sued England for libel, I believe.

And they have teams of process servers that are looking for him, mainly in Columbus, but I think they've extended the search elsewhere.

And he is holed up.

He's holed up somewhere.

Stick with us.

In a moment, we're going to turn from Andrew England to the movements that he's a part of.

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I want to broaden out and talk about the alt-right more generally.

And Rosie,

you've been reporting on this movement that we have come to call the alt-right

for some time now.

Rosie, how would you define this landscape that we call the quote-unquote alt-right?

Well, that's actually a really tricky question because,

you know, do you use that term to describe every neo-Nazi?

No.

There are

lots that are not alt-right or don't consider themselves alt-right.

I mean, I would say that the alt-right is this sort of

newer and more, you know internet-based uh white nationalist movement that is you know based a lot on like i had said earlier sort of 4chan culture meme culture and uses that kind of language to express itself a lot of the time yeah

what are some of the schisms in this broad patchwork of movements that we're talking about well there's tons and a lot of the leaders of these various factions you know feud with each other and hate each other and that kind of thing but um you know when I started reporting about the alt-right in late 2015,

it was, I guess, a little bit more cohesive than it is now and seemed to have a little bit more momentum, actually, in a way, than it does now.

Richard Spencer, one of the leaders of the Alt-Right and who has claimed credit for even coining the term,

he represents this sort of effort to intellectualize the alt-right and kind of present it as almost like a dry sort of theoretical kind of affair.

And he, you know, he runs a very innocently named think tank called the National Policy Institute.

But over the past year or so, we've seen the rise in, we've seen

some figures

in this far-right world start to distance themselves from him and from his allies.

And they've started calling themselves New Right.

And they've sort of rejected some of the most overtly racist or anti-Semitic kind of tenets of the movement.

And so already, I think, we're seeing seeing sort of a factionalization and sort of atomization of this whole thing.

How much influence do these folks have?

And how much attention do you think that they merit?

You know, this is something that I, as a journalist who has written and writes about them,

this is something that I struggle with because you don't want to give needless attention to, you know, to fringe characters who, at the end of the day, don't really matter.

At the same time, I do think that this is an ideology that's influencing a lot of people.

people.

And so I do think that the alt-right, because

it's not like David Duke and it's not, you know, people like that who have an incredible amount of baggage and who are not particularly savvy about how the media works or how the internet works, you know, the alt-right has been able to,

I wouldn't say go mainstream, but sort of edge closer to the mainstream.

And because of that, I do think that it's definitely a legitimate topic for journalists to write about.

And I think that journalists should be writing about about it.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: I was intrigued, Luke, by this sentence in your story.

To spend any significant amount of time in truth or forums is to feel the traps being set, the hook sinking in.

What if the mind wonders?

What are the entry points into this?

Like, what does it look like?

What are the posts?

What's that post, the kind of, you know, the alt-right starter guide?

Well, if anyone truly is interested in experiencing this, I would recommend that you just hang out a little bit on 8chan.

4chan

was what, and to explain 8-chan and 4chan, these are

internet message boards, essentially, image boards, where people will congregate and just go crazy on certain topics.

And these long threads develop, and everybody's chiming in,

offering evidence for this position, that position.

And I would say that that that's a very good example of how

this sort of truther

environment functions.

So if you do spend some time on there, even if you are a sane person, a well-educated person with some

critical thinking ability,

There is something seductive about it.

There is something seductive about these unexplained mysteries about how our society works and asking these questions

under the pretense of seeking out the truth as if some form of endless internet debate is going to surface the truth without actual facts and actual information.

But thousands of people do engage in this activity.

And so it really,

it can play with your head.

if you spend too much time in these things.

And

you'll start wondering, well, wait, maybe this conspiracy about this Jared Kushner-connected company having something to do with the Golan Heights and the Syria missile strike that Trump ordered against Syria, maybe there's actually something to it.

And let's, why don't we dig into the financial records of this company and find out every single person who's on the board of this company and do deep dives on their backgrounds.

And people will spend hours and hours and hours and days doing this stuff.

And,

you know, where does that lead?

It leads to more of this kind of, you know, circular conspiratorial thinking, which

in my mind, the way I imagine it is sort of either a rabbit hole or something kind of circling a drain, descending precipitously down to this depth where you find all kinds of far more toxic conspiracy theories, such as

the Holocaust denial, for example.

Aaron Powell, right.

At the very bottom of the internet is Holocaust denial, I think.

But I'm sure there's a new bottom somewhere.

One of the questions I get, which is a legitimate question, is are we making too much of these people?

We're putting Andrew Anglin on the cover of The Atlantic magazine, for instance.

My question is,

does this movement top out?

I mean, where do you think, how big does it get?

And by movement, I mean everything from so-called alt-writers, white nationalists, all the way to genuine neo-Nazis.

But

is there a natural limit on growth here?

I mean, obviously one would hope that there is, but how far do you think this moves through

young white male America?

Well, first of all, we don't actually have a good sense of how big the movement is.

It's not really something where we can quantify every single person who they claim lots of members, obviously.

Yeah, but it's not something where we can quantify every single person that identifies as alt-right and then say, okay, well, that's this, you know, such such percentage of the electorate or such and such percentage of Donald Trump supporters or anything like that.

But I do think that it's obviously had a big impact culturally, this movement, and also politically.

I mean, like, look back at Charlottesville.

I mean, that's when you saw this supposedly fringe movement kind of

hit right against mainstream politics and suddenly become a mainstream political issue.

Although the alt-right itself or the movement movement calling itself the alt-right is relatively new, the term is relatively new.

I mean,

these sorts of ideologies that it draws upon are actually very old.

So it's not as if it sort of is just happening now and then it might just wither away.

It might become something else.

There might be some new term that comes into fashion.

But, you know, as long as this is able to get spread around online, I don't really see it sort of going away entirely, no?

Rosie, why do you think that this movement, at least this incarnation of it,

goes so hand in hand with misogyny?

Aaron Ross Powell, I mean, could it be as basic as young men get rejected by girls and then just sort of take it way too far?

I mean, I'm not trying to be flippant about it, but I do think that

a lot of the people who

get interested in the men's rights movement or the alt-right are sort of

you know, younger, misfit guys.

And Luke made the point earlier about rejection and how rejection was a big part of Andrew England's story.

Aaron Ross Powell, I think it's important to recognize that the alt-right is just a new face of an old hate that's existed in this country since this country's founding.

And they do have a new language.

They have figured out how to use the internet very effectively.

And the question of how much can it grow and how much influence can it have, that is hard to quantify.

It's impossible to quantify.

What you saw in Charlottesville was a tiny concentrated core of extreme white nationalists who are willing to go into the street, get doxxed, have their names out there, potentially lose their jobs, and engage in street violence.

Now,

I think that that is the tip of an ideological iceberg.

There's a generation of angry young men who would never take those risks in the street, but are all too happy to sit online and self-radicalize and spew these really vile ideas.

And, you know, these guys are able to,

I guess, pass a little more easily in public as just regular citizens, but these are also kind of the astroturfy elements of the alt-right that are

starting to mainstream it more.

And, you know, Richard Spencer is never going to get a huge amount of traction in mainstream conservatism.

It's just not, he's just not.

I mean, you had Buckley back in the day policing these boundaries, right?

But extremist ideas, if we're going to call them that, or far-right extremism, that has always overlapped to some degree with mainstream conservatism.

It's just a matter of image control, and that's who gets the access to the corridors of power.

So

I do think it is a concern.

I'm of the same mind as Rosie that You don't want to give these guys a platform for their views, but we're journalists, and we have to to hold them accountable for their views, too, through reporting.

I think that is the way to cover them, to cover them critically through more investigative-type reporting than to just react to something crazy that Richard Spencer, Andrew Anglin, says.

Yeah.

You know, Luke, it's interesting you say that because when we were discussing what to do with your story and how to feature it,

I noted that The Atlantic was covering Hitler's ideology and the 1930s.

I'm not equating this moment to that moment, obviously, but I would say that before Hitler was taken seriously, he wasn't taken seriously.

But the Atlantic did take it seriously as a thought system.

And

that was one thing that weighed on us as we were thinking about these questions.

Yeah.

That's interesting.

We do indeed take these things seriously.

And I encourage all of our listeners to read Luke O'Brien's cover story in the December 2017 issue of The Atlantic.

And now let us turn from Nazis.

Let's turn from Nazis.

No, no, let's stay on Nazis.

That's the name of our next podcast, by the way.

Let us turn from Nazis.

It's a fashion show, man.

I'm going to ask you guys the question that I ask at the end of every episode of Radio Atlantic, which is, what would you like to keep?

What is something that you have heard, watched, seen, experienced, listened to recently that you do not want to forget.

Jeff?

Yeah, mine is easy.

It's

a year ago this week, my friend Gwen Eiffel died.

And I've been thinking about her all week and how much

our country could use a voice like hers right now.

Yeah.

Gwen Eiffel.

Well, I actually just recently watched the Joan Didian documentary on Netflix.

The part that really stuck in my mind was when she's asked about the famous scene in Slouching Toward Bethlehem where she meets the five-year-old girl who is tripping on acid.

I had a two-year-old at the time I was working on that,

so it was particularly vivid to me to see these other children.

And she's asked, you know, what did you think when you saw that?

What was your reaction?

What was it like to be a journalist in the room when you saw the little kid on acid?

And she goes, well,

let me tell you, it was gold.

I mean, that's the long and the short of it is

you live

for moments like that

if you're doing a piece.

And that's something that's just been sort of like sticking in my mind and making me think a lot about sort of rapportorial distance and those sorts of things.

Yeah.

Wow.

Gwen Eiffel, Joan Didian.

Well, I'm also a sports guy, so I'm going to hold on to Lonzo Ball's triple double the other night.

Lonzo Ball, the LA Lakers rookie point guard, been struggling.

A lot of critics coming at him, and he put up a very impressive triple-double the other night.

So the young man shows promise.

Indeed, one to remember.

Mine is, since we've been talking about the darker side of places like Reddit, I want to talk about one of the subreddits that I have over the past few years come to quite enjoy.

It's a community of writers called No Sleep, a subreddit which

amateur horror story writers go to write fiction for each other.

It's a fantastic community of writers.

Some of the stories are quite strong.

A podcast has grown out of it, the No Sleep Podcast, which is incredibly highly produced with multiple voice actors for every episode.

There are, in addition to Nazis, also some delights on Reddit.

That brings us once again to the end of another Radio Atlantic.

Rosie, Luke, thank you so much for joining us.

Sure.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Jeff, great having you as always.

Thank you, Matt.

That'll do it for this week's Radio Atlantic.

Thank you to Luke O'Brien and Rosie Gray for joining us.

Thank you to my co-host, Jeffrey Goldberg.

Alex Wagner will be back with us next week.

This episode was produced and edited by Kevin Townsend and Diana Douglas with production support from Kim Lau.

Check us out at facebook.com/slash radioatlantic and theatlantic.com/slash radio.

Make sure you check out the show notes in the episode description.

And if you like what you're hearing, rate and review us in Apple Podcasts and subscribe in your preferred podcast app.

Don't forget to check out our newest show, The Atlantic Interview.

The latest episode features a timely and illuminating conversation between Jeff and CNN's Jake Tapper.

Thanks also to John Batiste for our legendary theme song, which...

If you haven't heard, is now on Spotify.

Check it out, The Battle Hymn of the Republic.

Most importantly, thank you for listening.

We'll see you next week.